New Feature: Portfolio Snapshot

As I have been browsing different finance-related blogs, some of which appear in my links section, I noticed that some of my fellow bloggers are investing their funds in a portfolio of stocks. Some do it with a significant starting capital, some with pocket change. I don't want to judge the ones who have quite a lot of money to invest, because as a beginning investor I have nothing to say on this matter. But the ones who are doing it with pocket change, playing the market just to get ecperience with it, are loosing money, not on stocks, but on trade costs.

Yes, most online investing companies, E*Trade, Sharebuilder and others offer a certain amount of free trades when you sign up. This goes pretty fast and most of the times they require you to be an active trader.

This is the reason I decided not to empty my penny jar and invest in the stock market. First of all, I don't have a penny jar, nor do I have any money to spare for this matter. Secondly, if I need to experience the look and feel of online trading, I can do so on game.marketwatch.com.
Let me tell you what it is. It is a Virtual Stock Exchange (VSE), which lets you set up your own portfolio with VIRTUAL money, so if you suck, you will not loose your kid's college savings. Neither will you gain if you win. But it surely lets you try investing.

Here's my portfolio, the one I started over one month ago. My reasoning behind picking the stocks was "Pick the companies in the news that day". I don't really think that this is the right strategy, but for the lack of a better one, I picked the following:



The detailed view of the stocks can be found here.

More on these stocks to follow. I will try to make this a weekly type of post for my portfolio.